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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

When they put Sundar Pichai, a person of little brilliance, to lead Google, it was clear that they want to transform the place into just another money maker and destroy the original culture of the company.

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I would date this turnpoint decision back to when L. Page said in a meeting that, from now on, Google had to have as many engineers than Microsoft.

As someone that mostly enjoys the Microsoft ecosystem, that isn't necessarly a good goal.

Huh, who is stopping person of great brilliance to launch their own companies and preserve culture forever?

If there are no large companies with original culture after few decades of their founding it would just imply it is nature of things instead of being a particular person as chief executive.

Sundar is brilliant, just not in the ways you want. He went from developing an IE browser extension to a web browser to running the world's most powerful company. He understood that what Google needed to keep the numbers going up was not better search, but better market capture.

I wouldn't call Google the world's most powerful company. Saudi Aramco, for example, has more power.

> Saudi Aramco

It's powerful to a point. If it tries to flex its power too much, and international military coalition rolls over Saudi Arabia.

The House of Saud has done an incredible job ingratiating with multiple Republican Presidents personal family dynasties. They’ll be fine.

Saudi Aramco exists because the British Empire favored one nomad tribe over their adversaries to be granted land that appeared worthless but turned out to be covering the largest pile of treasure in the world.

It has always seemed to me that level of strategic direction doesn't come from the CEO's brain, but from the big investors. The CEO's job is to execute what they want.

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